A Place of Creative Expression

Posts Tagged ‘fashion’

It’s actually the redesign of an “old” scarf based on a photograph of the chancel wall at Trinity Church Boston. This scarf is brighter with crisper detail where as the earlier version had more of a soft rosy hue due to light falling from an adjacent stained glass window.

If you’ve not seen it first hand, Trinity’s chancel is hand stenciled with beautiful floral and spiritual details. Its design and decoration is not original to the 140-year old building designed by H. H. Richardson. The original apse in 1877 was much more simple. It was redesigned in the 1930s by Maginnis and Walsh.

This silk scarf featuring the chancel decoration is available exclusively in the Trinity Church gift shop. You can learn more about the chancel on the Art and Architecture page of the Trinity Church website and of course on a tour.

I’m pleased to share that two new cuff bracelets are available in the gift shop at Trinity Church in Copley Square. The designs are derived from the decorative and architectural features of that beautiful building, in this case the hand stenciled golden walls of the chancel and the stained glass window, The New Jerusalem, by John La Farge. Speaking of which … returning soon will be the silk scarf also featuring that bright blue design.

The shop is open Tuesday – Sunday. Learn more about location/direction on the church website: http://trinitychurchboston.org/

Boston philanthropist George Nixon Black Jr. commissioned John La Farge to produce The New Jerusalem in memory of his father and his sister, Marianne. The window illustrates the biblical text, “And I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

detail from the new jerusalem window, trinity church boston

It is a magnificent artistic expression that you can see for yourself when you visit Trinity Church and you can read a fictionalized account of the man who purchased the window, George Nixon Black, in the new book, The House at Lobster Cove by Jane Goodrich. It includes a chapter on the creation of the window.

I rose this morning intending to be quite disciplined. A cold rainy Monday. What better time to focus on (overdue) paperwork and organizing electronic files. Manilla file folders were at the ready as were a handful of new memory sticks. I decided to start with sorting images first … and that was my disciplinary downfall but creative uplift.

detail from John La Farge’s New Jerusalem

I chanced upon a recent photo I’d taken of The New Jerusalem, a magnificent stained glass window at Trinity Church in the City of Boston designed by John La Farge. It was a closeup of the jewels that sit atop the layers of painted and stained glass that compose the top panel of the window. All I had to do was figure out which memory stick to place it on. But somehow, perhaps because the jewels’ bright colored sparkling was in such contrast to the gray day around me, I found myself lost in their beauty and began to wonder … what if I …

And then there’s another what if and another what if until you kind of fall into a groove of playing … for hours! … with what’s evolving on the screen. Deconstructing and creating at the same time. Imagining what if this pattern were on paper, on a mug, etc. But mainly in the course of recent events for me, I wonder what if this design, or its next evolution, was applied to silk. Will it work?

I don’t know yet. It’s a work in progress, and I have to admit I’m excited to see what will happen. I’ll be sure to share! 🙂 Okay, back to paperwork …

Hot off the press … a new silk scarf debuting this week exclusively in the gift shop at Trinity Church in the City of Boston. The inspiration for the design is a stained glass window, The Sower and the Reaper, by Cottier & Co. of London, 1878, located in Trinity’s south transept.

I’ve seen the window for years now, photographing both the sower and the reaper, but recently it was the light shining through the wheat in the reaper’s arms that made me pause and in pausing I could see the parts that made up the beautiful whole.

And then I was able to play with those parts. A wonderful exercise producing other designs I hope to share in the near future. Meanwhile, I hope you have a chance to see the scarf for yourself in the shop, and you can learn more about the window on one of the excellent guided tours.

A new silk scarf with the design derived from a single pane of stained glass. A delightful process of staring at an image and trying to imagine what could be and then … seeing what actually comes into being! This scarf, the second in series of limited edition silk scarves, is available exclusively at the Trinity Church gift shop in Copley Square.